TriedIT - Software and Hardware News and Reviews

From AppleInsider comes this:

AppleInsider has learned that Apple’s popular line of iMac personal computers are about to undergo a substantial facelift that will showcase striking new industrial designs aimed at leaving both competitors and onlookers smitten.

People familiar with the matter say the Cupertino-based Mac maker has called upon its award-winning design chief Jonathan Ive and his team to cut the fat from the the current iMac line and outfit a pair of new Core 2 Duo-based models in a form factor that will be both slimmer and sleeker than today’s offerings.

Read the rest of this at AppleInsider.

I have been debating about getting my mother one of these for awhile. Either an iMac or a Mac Mini. Well, now I have to see what upgrades are in store for the iMac before considering her next computer. I wish Apple would give the Mac Minis a necessary upgrade as well.

According to this AppleInsider article, the touch screen on the forthcoming iPhone could spread to Apple’s other products.

Financial experts at UBS Investment Research say they believe Apple Inc. is developing a “mega-platform” based around its recently introduced multi-touch display technology that will facilitate broad growth opportunities through an assortment of future products.

Again this is all just guessing, but if it is really as cool as it looks like it will be, multi-touch iPods and MacBooks would be pretty sweet. Here’s hoping it actually does happen.

As much as we Mac users feel like we’re invincible, there are many extra steps we can take to make our Mac OS X systems far more secure than they already are. Here are some good suggestions for making sure your OS X system is even more impenetrable.

The most important of these is enable your firewall. It’s simple and easy to do and ensures your system is more protected against remote attacks. In addition to the tips on this page, it is worthwhile to acquire a virus scanner for your OS X system, even though Macs are far less likely to be victims of virus attacks. That’s not to say one can’t happen. It never hurts to be protected. Security is important for all computer users and everyone should take a proactive approach to making sure their systems aren’t being exploited.

Dashboard, introduced with Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), gives users quick and easy access to mini-applications called widgets that can provide a variety of information and help users accomplish common tasks. On Apple’s Dashboard widgets download page there are a ton of different widgets available. While I’ve tried a bunch of them, there are many more that I have yet to play with. Of the ones I’ve tried, here are the 10 best and most useful Dashboard widgets that I have used.

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OS X Basics discusses the four major browsers available for OS X and the main advantages of each. He prefers Firefox on OS X, and I’d have to agree. I use several extensions which I have come to depend on that Safari doesn’t have. Also, since I use Mac, Windows, and Linux regularly I like having one browser that is the same on each platform. Safari might be faster to load and run, but evidence also shows it could hurt your system’s performance.

From AppleInsider:

People familiar with the latest pre-release say Apple notes just one significant change since builds 8P2130 and 8P130 were issued last week, specifically a bug fix to ImageIO that was affecting image import speeds.

It looks like 10.4.9 will be out soon. AppleInsider also notes that the refinements Apple has been making to 10.4.9 may signal that it is the last maintenance release of Tiger before they focus solely on Leopard (10.5).

“Poke around the net for a while searching for information on what it’s like to switch to a Mac, and you’ll quickly get a face full of hyperbole, zealots, platform bigots, feature weenies, and naysayers - from both the Windows and Mac camps.
“But there are precious few places to get an honest word about what it’s like to switch, other than some deeply technical face-offs. So, I’ve been taking notes for the past few years, and thought I’d write them down.”

I have to say I agree with most of the things on this guy’s list. One of my favorite things is the camaraderie of fellow Mac users at work. When I first started at my current job in 2002, I was the only Mac user. People left and right would make comments about my iBook G3 700Mhz and joking about my little Mac. Now, 5 years later, many of my friends and a lot of people at work now have MacBooks and other Mac computers. Since I’ve been a Mac user the longest, I find myself helping out my fellow Mac users on an almost daily basis. Oftentimes they will tell me about something new they discovered.

I’ve had people randomly come up to me at work and in public at airports asking about my MacBook Pro.

Beyond that, since I was primarily a Linux user, switching from Windows hasn’t been too difficult for me. I like the fact that OS X gives me a lot of the power that I am used to in a *nix operating system.

Check out the list.

Informit.com is running an article about the top 5 hard drive diagnostic and repair utilities for Mac. Looks like I’m going to be getting one to try soon to see if I can fix my girlfriend’s screwed up PowerBook drive. I’ve replaced her drive, but she’d like to get her photos back. If I’m successful I’ll write an article about what I did to get the files off her laptop’s busted drive.

Windows and Linux have tons of BitTorrent clients available for them. What about on the Mac? There are several decent BitTorrent clients available, so I decided to check out four of them, and see what I thought about each of them.

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According to AppleInsider, Apple soon plans to release a sub-notebook version of the MacBook:

This new tiny MacBook, people familiar with the project say, remains in development ahead of its target launch date around the time WWDC rolls around mid-year. It will be both lighter and more compact than any other Mac portable Apple has put forth in recent years, bundling a display of similarly smaller proportions.

Also setting the new model aside from its existing counterparts, those same people say, may be the conspicuous absence of an optical disc drive. Although Apple’s original plans for the notebook called for its inclusion, reports are that the daunting ergonomics have recently driven company engineers to make a concession, forming yet another parallel between the new notebook and the defunct PowerBook 2400.

At the same time, the new MacBook model is expected to introduce some features not yet available with Apple’s existing notebook offerings, such as onboard NAND flash. Plans reportedly call for the notebook to be the first of the company’s MacBook offerings to utilize the solid-state memory in order to improve power efficiency and facilitate near instantaneous boot times. This feature, however, had not been frozen upon last check.

I’m interested to see what the specs and price point of this MacBook will be. I’m not sure if I would get one since I do not travel much and the trips I have taken my MacBook Pro on I didn’t feel hindered by the size or weight of the laptop. That being said, the article goes on to point out that it would likely be more successful in Japan where the Japanese prefer more compact and lighter computing devices. Perhaps it will be on par, size-wise, with the Sony Vaio TX series of laptops. Hopefully at a much cheaper price.